CG Garage

Donna Smith was the first woman to serve as President of Physical Production and Post Production at a major Hollywood studio. Her years at Universal produced Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, Apollo 13 and Casino. She arrived in Los Angeles with no film school and no contacts, took a temp job at Chartoff-Winkler during the Rocky II reshoots, and was running The Terminator with a nonunion crew by 1984 while the town called her "some broad." She went on to run a completion bond company and serve as President of Women in Film.

This is the first conversation Chris ever had with her, recorded at THU in Malta in 2018. Halfway through, he describes winning VFX bids by turning them into creative conversations with directors and guesses that makes him a producer. Donna tells him, "It is, kiddo." She became his mentor, and that line is where his path as a producer started, all the way to co-founding Monstrous Moonshine. Most VFX artists making shorts are already producing without the title, and Donna lays out what happens after the short gets noticed, down to why Universal returned 42 unsolicited scripts a day unopened.

Originally released November 12, 2018 as episode 198, with a new introduction from Chris.

Links and sponsor block Donna Smith on IMDB >

Mentioned THU (Trojan Horse was a Unicorn) > Women in Film >

Films: Rocky II, Raging Bull, True Confessions, The Terminator, K-9, Leviathan (short),Maze Runner, Lost in Translation

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Ed Ulbrich thinks the world needs more slop. Flood the market with AI-generated content and work with real taste becomes impossible to miss, which is how he expects the next Fincher to break through. That take comes from someone who has called these shifts early before. As a Digital Domain executive and later its CEO, he helped get Benjamin Button and Tron: Legacy made, then produced Ender's Game himself. He went on to run production at Metaphysic, doing licensed likeness work during the strike, and now he advises the startups building AI into film production.

Those startups are where he sees the trouble. AI-native studios are walking into the trap that hollowed out visual effects. Most came from tech and raised money to make movies, then found that selling a film is as hard as it ever was. So they are taking VFX work on franchise films to keep cash flowing, with nobody on staff who knows how to price a bid, and the studios are happy to play them against each other. Ed's advice to them, in his words, is to swim up. Chris and Daniel also get into ByteDance owning both the platform and the model, and into where artists learn taste once the junior jobs are gone.

Ed Ulbrich on LinkedIn >

Ed Ulbrich on IMDB >

Companies and tools mentioned

• Digital Domain >
• Metaphysic >
• Moonvalley >
• Seedance (ByteDance) >
• Motion Picture Association >
• AMC Theatres >

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Digger opened to $8 million on a nine-figure budget, and critics split almost exactly in half. Chris and Daniel think Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Tom Cruise made one of the best films of the year, and they spend this Moonshine Drive-In trying to work out why so many people hated it. Their suspicion is that the divide runs by age. Chris and a friend his age both loved it. Both of their teenage sons hated it. Daniel's theory is that younger audiences find films like Brazil and A Clockwork Orange on Tubi with fifty years of approval already attached, so liking something the whole internet calls garbage is a skill most of them never had to build.

Chris and Daniel also make the case that Digger is the answer to Don't Look Up. Adam McKay's film knows it's right and treats anyone who disagrees as the enemy. Digger opens as a broad cartoon of a Texas oil baron, then slowly asks you to feel for him, with Jesse Plemons delivering what Chris calls one of the best speeches ever put in a movie. They also get into why this is Cruise's biggest career risk since Magnolia, and why nobody greenlights this film without him attached.

Spoiler warning: the full plot and ending are discussed from 30:16. Everything before that is spoiler-free.

People

• Alejandro G. Iñárritu, director
• Tom Cruise, Jesse Plemons, John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg (cast)
• Nikos Kalaitzidis, VFX Supervisor, Digital Domain

Films referenced

Don't Look Up, Dr. Strangelove, Brazil, The Truman Show, Downsizing, Children of Men, Edge of Tomorrow, Magnolia, A Clockwork Orange, Fight Club, The Irishman, One Battle After Another

Center Grid Virtual Studio >

Most VFX supervisors trained on tentpoles have no idea how to make an independent film. Ed Douglas (VFX supervisor on Kane Parsons' Backrooms) and Peter Timberlake (VFX on Curry Barker's Obsession) have built careers doing exactly that, and they're back with Chris and Daniel for a Rough Cut on where VFX leadership is heading. Ed recently bid the same work at $8,000 with a legacy vendor and $250 elsewhere, which is why on a $10 million film he works as supervisor and VFX producer at once. Peter makes the case that big-studio pipelines got complicated to impress other pipeline TDs, and both of them have blunt advice for graduates who can't find a studio that's hiring.

The panel also takes on AI. The year's breakout films came from YouTube-native directors working without generative tools, while Scorsese has signed on to advise Black Forest Labs. Ed argues the word "AI" now covers dozens of unrelated technologies and the industry needs sharper language for them. Chris raises the one-person Grok remake of The Odyssey and the IMAX audience that booed an AI ad before Nolan's film started. The episode closes on tax subsidies and whether they've made movies more expensive.

Peter Timberlake on LinkedIn >

Peter Timberlake on IMDB >

Peter Timberlake on Instagram >

Queen Studio >

Edward Douglas on LinkedIn >

Edward Douglas on IMDB >

Films mentioned: Backrooms, Obsession, The Odyssey, Zodiac, The Irishman, The Batman, Oblivion, Tron: Legacy, The Day After Tomorrow, Jurassic Park, Rogue One, The Rise of Skywalker, Avatar, Digger

Companies and tools mentioned: ILM, Weta FX, Digital Domain, Black Forest Labs (Flux), Grok, Wonder Studios, A24, Queen Studio, VIEW Conference, USC ICT (Institute for Creative Technologies), Blender, Nuke, Maya, After Effects, Full Sail University

People mentioned: Kane Parsons, Curry Barker, Inde Navarrette, Osgood Perkins, Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, James Cameron, Tom Cruise, Paul Debevec, Richard Crudo, Steve "Spaz" Williams, David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan

Jonathan Goldman called CAA to find out if his agent still worked there, and the replies to his Threads post said more about Hollywood's middle layer than most trade coverage this year. Jonathan has spent thirty years on the development side of the business. He started as Phillip Noyce's assistant, directed second unit for him, then rose from story producer to showrunner at Thom Beers' Original Productions on series including Ice Road Truckers. Last year he pitched six projects with CAA packaging and A-list partners. One got a development step, and the network passed a year later.

Chris and Daniel get their answer about CAA. Jonathan's version is that the people who greenlight shows aren't paid to take risks, in a town that gamblers built. The route there runs through Noyce handing him second unit at Shea Stadium once he'd fetched the coffee, a Phoenix strip club series he pitched as the Sopranos of the Southwest, a Terlingua, Texas murder trial he covered for Nat Geo, and why Obsession, Backrooms, Widow's Bay and Coyote vs. Acme all made the same case for leaving creatives alone. He also predicts the next studio mistake, which is plucking a YouTube director for the full studio treatment and then declaring YouTube filmmaking over when the movie tanks.

Guest links

Jonathan Goldman on IMDB >

Jonathan Goldman on Threads >

Jonathan Goldman on LinkedIn >

Companies, films and shows mentioned: CAA, WGA, DGA, Original Productions, Fremantle, Warner Bros. Discovery, National Geographic, Apple TV, HBO, Imagine Entertainment, Netflix, A24, Neon, Miramax, Paramount, The Saint, Clear and Present Danger, The Bone Collector, Dead Calm, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Ice Road Truckers, Deadliest Catch, Badlands, Texas, Obsession, Backrooms, Widow's Bay, Coyote vs. Acme, The Bourne Supremacy, Apocalypse Now

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Warner Bros. was ready to write off Coyote vs. Acme, and after a sale to another company it has taken in about $85 million as of this episode's release. That sits inside a summer that put $4.7 billion through the box office, a record in dollars with ticket sales still short of the peak, and theaters full of young people lining up for smaller originals like Buddy alongside Nolan's Odyssey and Spider-Man. Chris, Daniel, and James Blevins read it as proof that the majors can no longer pick winners. Daniel adds that Neon and A24 now sell what the studios used to sell, an identity people buy tickets on.

Daniel said on an earlier episode that if Backrooms hit, everyone should look into SCP and liminal space horror. A24, the studio behind Backrooms, has since taken worldwide rights to V/H/S: SCP, set for a 2027 theatrical release. Daniel says Spielberg is producing The Mandela Catalogue and Siren Head is headed for a major movie, all from a horror genre born on YouTube that the studios missed while they skipped two generations of filmmakers. He expects There Is No Antimemetics Division to be the next book bought for a film. Chris asks whether anyone can own Backrooms at all. The panel also talks through the Paramount and Warner Bros. deal just days before the settlement was announced. AI gets its own stretch, starting with the AI film festival running alongside Venice and the new guild agreements, and turning into an argument over whether the flood of mediocre AI work corrects itself. James says it does. Chris points to ZBrush and its identical alien creatures. The show ends on Daniel's lineup for a Monstrous Moonshine Film Festival, where Stripes and Full Metal Jacket count as the same movie.

Tools and companies mentioned: Warner Bros., Paramount, A24, Neon, Spooky Pictures, Image Nation Studios, ZBrush, Panavision, SAG-AFTRA, WGA

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Kane Parsons was 19, had never worked inside a professional visual effects pipeline, and had taught himself the shots he needed in Blender in his bedroom. Edward Douglas, VFX supervisor on Backrooms (also Long Legs, Keeper, and multiple Oz Perkins films), built the production pipeline to fit him: direct access to vendor files, animation, and cameras, so Kane could work the same way he always had. The film delivered 600 VFX shots inside an 830 shot runtime, on an indie budget and timeline.

Chris and Daniel connect this to the same shift they discussed with Peter Timberlake on Obsession: movies built on constraint outperforming movies built on scale. Douglas walks through the CG grounding rule that shaped the film (the practical hat that never gets replaced), the VHS pass every found footage frame ran through, and why horror keeps producing the year's most interesting visual effects work while franchise budgets keep climbing.

Guest links

Edward Douglas on IMDB >

Edward Douglas on LinkedIn >

Tools and companies mentioned Blender, A24, Roxel Creative, Zoic, Red Komodo, After Effects, Electronic Arts, BioWare, Long Legs, Pig, The Monkey, Keeper, Oz Perkins films

CenterGrid Virtual Studio >

Chris and Daniel are thrilled that Widow's Bay is now shooting its second season, and they've brought on Brian Drewes, the man whose team at Zero VFX made the show's VFX disappear, to talk about how they did it. Drewes and his crew are based in Massachusetts, and the show's authentic New England vibe, the peeling paint, the real fishing towns, the moldy-book-smell houses, comes from a team that actually lives there and knows the difference between real and Disneyland-fisherman. They walk through the twin-boat rig, the night the crew knocked on doors across a real town to kill practical lights instead of shooting a split screen, and why the darkest, cheapest choice on set is usually the right one.

The conversation turns hard on AI provenance. Drewes is building Somantix, a system for embedding C2PA policy data directly into delivered files. He says the terms of service governing AI tools change almost weekly, and that studios have no central record of which vendor used what tool under what rules. He and Daniel dig into who actually owns the risk when generative tools get involved, and why treating AI policy as infrastructure is the only way any of this makes sense.

Brian Drewes on IMDB >

Brian Drews on LinkedIn >

Somantix AI >

Zero VFX >

Tools and companies mentioned: Zero VFX, Zinc, Google, EC2, GCE, Dream Machine, C2PA, Somantix, ElevenLabs, TurboSquid, robots.txt

Thank you to our premier sponsor:

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Nobody thinks Obsession has visual effects. That's the point. Peter Timberlake, the VFX supervisor behind one of the year's biggest indie breakouts, joins Chris and Daniel to break his silence on work so subtle most audiences never register it as VFX at all. The centerpiece is the character Nikki: rather than fighting to escape the uncanny valley, director Curry Barker asked Timberlake to push straight into it, mismatching her facial expressions on purpose so her eyes tell one emotional story while the rest of her face tells another. The result reads as a performance choice, not an effect, and it's exactly the kind of restraint the team wanted. Peter walks through why the studio debated whether to talk about this work publicly at all, and lands on a simple answer: nothing he says can take anything away from the lead actress's performance.

Before Obsession, Peter built his career the hard way: driving to LA with two thousand dollars, sleeping in a parking lot, and landing his first industry job cleaning dishes at Framestore. He went on to found his own studio, Queen Studio, in 2018, work at Weta and The Mill, and eventually build the small, scrappy team that shot Obsession in twenty days after blocking the entire film shot for shot in Unreal Engine before a single frame was captured. Chris and Daniel dig into what indie filmmakers can actually learn from this: planning replaces budget, ownership replaces plug-and-play pipelines, and the best VFX work is often the kind the audience never notices.

Guest links: Peter Timberlake LinkedIn > Peter Timberlake IMDB > Peter Timberlake Instagram > Queen Studio LinkedIn > Focus Features LinkedIn > Focus Features Instagram >

Tools and companies mentioned: Framestore LA, Weta, The Mill, Sony Imageworks, Queen Studio, Maya, Cinema 4D, TurboSquid, DaVinci Resolve, Embergen, Unreal Engine, Arri Alexa 65, Panavision, Peacock, TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival), Focus Features

People mentioned: Curry Barker (director, Obsession), Taylor Clemens (DP), Haley Johnson (producer), Michael Rolla (comp supervisor, mutual connection), Janelle Croshaw Ralla (VFX supervisor colleague, Spike Jonze collaborator), Edward Douglas (upcoming guest re: Backrooms)

Thank you to our sponsor: CenterGrid Virtual Studio >

Easy Rider is not a good movie. It's a chaotic, half-improvised, drug-fueled mess that stumbles for its first half and only becomes a movie in retrospect, once the ending lands. And that's exactly why Chris and Daniel keep coming back to it. Joining them is Richard Crudo, ASC, who spent years in friendship with László Kovács, the film's cinematographer, and brings firsthand insight into how a low-budget biker-movie veteran ended up accidentally rewriting what cinematography was allowed to look like. Flares, handheld chaos, a single zoom lens pushed past its limits, film stock literally dropped in a bathtub. Every mistake became doctrine.

The conversation keeps circling back to a bigger question: why does a movie built entirely out of accidents still work, and what does that tell filmmakers chasing polish today? Kovács shot on instinct and natural light because the budget demanded it, not because he planned a movement, and Crudo, Chris, and Daniel trace how that constraint produced a documentary rawness no amount of intentional design has matched since. It's a conversation about permission: what happens when the people trained to avoid every mistake in the book stop caring what the old guard thinks.

Reference:

• Richard Crudo, ASC >
• Gear referenced: Arriflex IIC, Angenieux 25-250mm zoom, Bolex 16mm, Kodak 5254 film stock, 9-light fixtures

Sponsors: Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/